Installing the Eclipse PHP IDE

I recently wanted to try out the Eclipse PHP IDE, the official Eclipse project that is endorsed/backed by Zend (I’m not entirely sure about the nature of their relationship, to be honest). I already had a working Eclipse installation that I had used to try out PHPeclipse for Eclipse (not to be confused with the PHP IDE), so I didn’t want to bother downloading a brand new full package of Eclipse that includes the PHP IDE and all its requirements. So, I set about on a tedious journey to figure out how to install PHP IDE using the Eclipse Update Manager. These are my notes.

NOTE: If you don’t already have a working copy of Eclipse and you want to try out the PHP IDE, then these notes are not for you. Simply download the full package and install it. Everything should work fine out of the box. These notes are for those who have a working installation of Eclipse, want to install PHP IDE via the Update Manager, and are having trouble finding all the download sites for the PHP IDE prerequisites.

Disable PHPeclipse (if needed)

First off, if you have PHPeclipse installed, you’ll need to disable it. Navigate to Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration. From the tree on the left, find PHPEclipse, highlight it, and choose the “Disable” link from the pane on the right.

Install the PHP IDE Prerequisites

The PHP IDE installation page lists a handful of runtime prerequisites for the PHP IDE plugin. However, it doesn’t list any URLs directing you to where the projects are located or what Update Manager URLs to use. Thus, I’m providing those links here.

For each of these prerequisites, you must follow these steps to install the package via the Eclipse Update Manager:

Open the Update Manager at Help > Software Updates > Find and Install...

Select “Search for new features to install” and click the Next button

Click the New Remote Site... button on the right

Enter a name and the update URL for the update site, click OK

Make sure the checkbox next to the new site is checked and click Finish

Follow the prompts to install the new package

Now that you know how to install the packages, here are the prerequisites and their update URLs:

Install the PHP IDE Plugin

Now that you have installed all the prerequisites, you are ready to install the PHP IDE plugin, and you shouldn’t encounter any problems now since all the prerequisites are available. To install the PHP IDE plugin, follow the same directions above to set up the PHP IDE update site in the Update Manager using the following update URL: